Heather Mills: I didn't tell Piers Morgan he could listen to my voicemails

Thursday 9 February 2012 14:38 BST

'It's madness': Heather Mills told the inquiry her life was made a misery by the tabloids after she married Paul McCartney

Heather Mills revealed today that her former husband Sir Paul McCartney once left 25 voicemail messages on her mobile phone after a blazing row - but denied giving Piers Morgan permission to listen to any of them.

The former model cast doubt on evidence from the former Daily Mirror editor and accused another unnamed journalist of unlawfully accessing her phone.

Miss Mills told the judicial inquiry into the press that the journalist, who cannot be named for legal reasons, called her hours after the message was left and asked her about her argument with Sir Paul.

She told the Royal Courts of Justice: "He said, 'Look Heather, you know we've heard that you and Paul have had an argument and I have just heard a message of him singing on your phone to ask for forgiveness.'

"I said there is no way you could know that unless you have been listening to my messages, and he laughed."

Mr Morgan had once boasted of being played a voicemail that Sir Paul left on Miss Mills's mobile in which he sang his hit We Can Work It Out. Under questioning from Robert Jay QC, she denied giving Mr Morgan permission to access or listen to her voicemail.

Miss Mills also told Lord Justice Leveson how the tabloid press made her life a misery once her marriage to the musician started to turn sour.

Miss Mills, who was forced to have one leg amputated, said: "I was held up as overcoming adversity and as a charity campaigner, and then the second I met my ex-husband it became 'one-legged ex-bitch' and 'cow' and every awful word you can think of."

She submitted 65 hours of video footage to the inquiry which showed her being pursued relentlessly by paparazzi.

In a three-minute clip broadcast to the court, her assistant went undercover and secretly filmed a pack of photographers outside Miss Mills's home in Brighton.

One photographer was videoed peeping over her fence and saying: "Someone should just bring a hand drill down and put a f***ing hole in it."Miss Mills said: "It is just crazy. You can't do anything about it. It's harassment, it's abuse, it's madness."

However, attention was focused on the hacking of her mobile phone in 2001 soon after she had a row with Sir Paul. She said that she had told him she was flying to India to raise money for an earthquake charity.

She continued: "He wasn't happy about this. We had an argument and I had to leave the house and I went to stay with a friend in Middlesex and turned off my phone."

Miss Mills told the inquiry that when she turned the phone back on she found she had 25 saved messages, adding: "I didn't think too much of it - I thought I had pressed the wrong button."

She said that all the voicemails were from Sir Paul "asking for forgiveness", and in one he "sang a little ditty of one of his songs into the voicemail".

Miss Mills told the inquiry that no-win-no-fee agreements were needed to ensure that newspapers would pick up the entire cost of cases brought by people who have "absolutely no money".

"There are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who have been through horrific situations with papers making up stories and they have no recourse," she added.

She said the Press Complaints Commission should contain "respected individual members of the public" who would join it for a year, meaning they could not be bribed, blackmailed, or threatened over their decisions.